Windows On The Future

COMMENTARY

Information Age So Far Looks Like Fewer People Working, Less Money To Spend.

August 19, 1995|CLARENCE PAGE and Chicago Tribune

With Windows 95 and other new cybernetic gadgets making headlines everywhere, it looks like boom times ahead for Microsoft and other "information age" technology firms. But one question nags at me: Will anyone be around who can afford to buy what the new technologies produce?

It is becoming painfully obvious that, for all the flowery talk we hear from people in both political parties about new-age jobs, manufacturers in the coming Information Age are the people who don't need people, at least not as workers.

Factories hire fewer workers yet produce more goods and higher profits than ever before. Despite glowing predictions of new technologies creating more jobs, employers privately admit to having little need for more people. Many of the 1.8 million workers who lost their jobs in the manufacturing sector between 1989 and 1993, for example, were displaced by automation or by competition from automated foreign companies.

For example, those of us who spent our summers working in steel mills in the late 1960s hardly recognize the industry, now that it has eliminated more than 220,000 jobs, or half its work force, since 1980. Thousands more are expected to go by 2010.

Of those who lost their jobs to automation, only one-third were able to find new jobs in the service sector, and then at a 20 percent drop in pay, according to Business Week.

Manufacturers only need people as consumers. The more people buy, the more goods and profits the manufacturers can make - with fewer workers. But what happens when there are not enough workers left to buy what the manufacturers are producing without those workers?

"The emperor has no clothes," says Jeremy Rifkin, president of the Washington-based Foundation on Economic Trends. "We are making the transition from industrial labor to boutique labor. We are certainly not going to need as many workers to perform repetitive (assembly line) tasks as we used to."

In his provocative new book, "The End of Work" (Tarcher/Putnam), Rifkin points out that today's anxious Americans could have seen this coming had they paid closer attention to the way blacks began to lose jobs a half-century ago, first to the mechanized cotton pickers in the rural South, then to the automated factories in the industrial North.

Unemployment never topped 8.5 percent for blacks and 4.6 percent for whites between 1947 and 1953, Rifkin notes. But by 1964, after 1.6 million blue-collar jobs had vanished, black unemployment had jumped to 12.4 percent, while white unemployment stayed at only 5.9 percent.

By the early '70s, whites, too, began to feel the pinch. Since then, the only Americans whose incomes have grown in inflation-adjusted dollars have been those who have at least two years of post-secondary education. As many corporations shave away layers of middle management in new-wave downsizing, they find they can get more done with fewer bosses running around, too.

I don't buy all of Rifkin's alarmism, but he is grappling, at least, with something Americans already are getting justifiably alarmed about.

Much of today's "angry white male" political resentment stems from government's failure to respond to these developments. Unfortunately a politics of distraction has set in.

Labor Secretary Robert Reich has long recognized the fears of what he calls "the anxious class," but his response, job training, often has been out of synch with the jobs private industry wants in a rapidly changing age.

And, so far, most of the presidential debate has been tied up with emotional scapegoat issues like welfare, immigration, school prayer, flag-burning and affirmative action.

House Speaker Newt Gingrich is famously excited about the new information age. Yet, neither Gingrich nor his "Third Wave" futurist friends, Alvin and Heidi Toffler, for all their talk about eliminating "mass culture" and "mass production," offer a sentence in their new book, "Creating a New Civilization" (Gingrich wrote the foreword), about what to do with the masses whose jobs are eliminated.

Rifkin sees the future in Hewlett-Packard's decision to shorten work weeks in its Grenoble, France, plant. After it offered its employees four-day weeks in exchange for a 24-hour, seven-day-a-week operation, the plant's production tripled. French politicians also have been debating the possibility of tax waivers and other incentives to encourage shorter work weeks, if it can turn welfare recipients into taxpayers.

That tactic might work here, too. First we need to talk about it. We need politicians who know how to address the future of jobs besides their own.